Last night while I was in the car with my roommate, I was discussing how if I had just kept up with a few projects that I had started in the past, I’d probably have some mild success and traction with at least one of them by now. I just finished up Rework by 37signals and I think I got the most out of the very last page of the book from the essay about Inspiration. Inspiration is perishable, when you have it you work your ass off nonstop until you literally can’t work anymore. It’s an amazing feeling and such a high to be working on something that you truly believe can change the world. As my roommate says, it’s 20 hours of work for 10 minutes of fun and that’s what all my past projects have seemed to end as, only 10 minutes of fun.

So I realized the problem is that once the inspiration goes away, and it always seems to run out at some point, I end with this ‘meh’ feeling and things just aren’t as fun as they used to be. It sucks to admit this happens, and I’m writing this blog post to help myself from making lies in believing that I’m still pumped about things I’ve started earlier and convincing myself that I’m just too busy at the moment to put time into it. Instead, I need to just suck it up and get back to work on things that I’ve started until they’re finished. If I was excited enough at one point to put so much work into it, I might as well complete it and stick to it so that it at least has a shot. My goal with any project of mine is to just have people use it and appreciate it, not to make millions and cash out quick. So quitting is obviously the worst thing I can do, but also the easiest thing to do because I can always make excuses as to why it would never have worked anyway.

Some of the past projects I’ve quit include a web app directory in 2007 that I didn’t see a market for after it was all built and complete. It was also designed terribly, code wise, so changes took far too long, never try to roll your own framework if you really don’t know what you’re doing. Now I see about 5 or 6 clones that all have a decent user base and I think how that could have been me.

I also had a podcast with two friends that was running for about a month back in 2008. We had about 10 listeners by episode 5 but since we were expecting overnight success, and didn’t get it, we decided that we just didn’t have the time to continue working on it.

Finally, I created a Craigslist alert app which, after spamming twitter quite a bit, ended up with about 100 happy users. I saw some opportunity to make it even better so I started from scratch and started developing what I would describe now as Notifo + Twilio + other cool features. Neither of these services existed at the time, and I had a family friend who is an amazing web designer on board for equity to help out. I had some personal issues that set me back about 6 months and by the time I came around I saw too many competitors in the space and decided to stop development and not even give it a shot.

After thinking last night about all these things, I ended up being a little disappointed with myself, so here I am writing a blog post to make sure I never make these mistakes again. The point of me telling you? I’m hoping you keep me in check. If I say I have a project to share with you, hound me until I actually release it.